The LEVEL 11 blog

Fresh off a historic performance in the NBA finals where he led the Cavaliers to their first NBA Championship, LeBron James may never suit up for his hometown of Cleveland again. A free agent this summer, LeBron has the option to stay in Ohio or jump ship to play in another city of his choice. Miami and New York are two obvious destinations, but recently, the Los Angeles Lakers have reportedly emerged as the frontrunner to sign James. As a storied franchise with a young core and new head coach Luke Walton leading the way, L.A. has suddenly become much more attractive to the King. Already on a huge high from the recent Championship, fans in Cleveland may just have their hearts ripped out again like they did 6 years ago when LeBron left town to join the Miami Heat.

Or maybe not.

Here at Level 11, we are definitely not NBA insiders, in fact we are far from that. Our goal is to help you build your business through the power of digital media, and we know how to do it right. The story related above was crafted not to stir up any rumors about LeBron leaving Cleveland, but to teach how to create engaging content. Blogs, Facebook posts, videos, and other content has the potential to engage your business with a massive audience if it is done correctly. On the other hand, if done in a dull or boring manner, you can lull your audience to sleep and slow your engagement rates to a crawl. Below, we will give a few easy suggestions to help your business create compelling content.

It all starts with a great headline. Whether it's a short or long, your headline needs to grab attention and tell a story in such a way that it pulls someone in to read it. By including both LeBron and the Lakers in this headline, people will click on it without even considering that the source isn't affiliated with sports at all. Sports analyst Dan Patrick spoke of this phenomenon when he said, "Los Angeles gets clicks." Think of big Brands, big names, or popular cities, places, or topics that are likely to have strong interest.

In our LeBron story, we employed the technique of “newsjacking,” where you piggyback off the attention of the news onto another item. So why did we choose LeBron and L.A.? That man and that market are as big as it gets in the basketball world and millions of people follow them passionately, always searching for the latest news on their favorite player or team. If you are going to effectively newsjack, choose stories that you know will lead you to your customers. So whether that big topic is a national brand or a local celebrity, building your content around those iconic subjects will boost traffic almost every time.

Lastly, make it fun! Sure, it's best to "give away" insight in your industry in your posts or videos, but focusing your message only on your latest model or brand new service can be difficult to read sometimes. Using current events or other examples in your content can help to illustrate a point and grab people's attention. Think of how the LeBron story in this post pulled you into this "exciting" subject of creating content!

So it still remains to be seen who King James will be suiting up for in the next NBA season, but whether it's in Cleveland or in L.A. (we're still holding out hope for Utah Jazz!), you can be sure Level 11 will be all over the story. Well, at least you can be sure you'll see a catchy headline about it from this blog where we've newsjacked that story and taught some important content creation principles with it!

About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members in Utah, Washington, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams which leads to powerful, efficient advertising campaigns.

If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today!